It’s hard to think of the Washington Post as a small-town newspaper that cozied up to
politicians in power. But that’s what it was when Katharine Graham took over
the reins of the family media company after the death of her husband. The paper
had been published by Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, since he bought it at a
bankruptcy auction in 1933. In 1946 he handed over the paper to his son-in-law,
Philip Graham. But Graham’s 1963 suicide—following a romantic scandal and a
nervous breakdown—led to his widow, Katharine, taking The Post into her own hands. As a female raised largely by wealthy
absentee parents she had no great faith in her own abilities. Still, she
ultimately rose to the occasion, hiring Ben Bradlee as editor of the Washington Post and standing by him as
the Post became a major player in the
publication of the Pentagon Papers and, a few years later, in the Watergate
investigations that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard
Nixon.
Every movie buff knows All
the President’s Men, the 1976 Watergate thriller that turned Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob
Woodward into action heroes uncovering presidential dirty tricks. But even
those of us who lived through the 1971 disclosure of the top-secret Pentagon
Papers by Daniel Ellsberg may be a bit fuzzy in our recollections of what this scandal
was all about. The papers, from the U.S. Department of Defense, traced the
history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, proving the extent to
which various presidents and their cabinet officers had lied to Congress and to
the American people, concealing the impossibility of victory in Southeast Asia. When
the New York Times, which had begun
publishing the papers, faced a legal injunction, the Washington Post stepped into the fray.
What makes this a great subject for a movie is the fact that
Katharine Graham treasured her long friendships with such political leaders as
Robert McNamara, who’d been secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and
Johnson. We see at the very beginning of the film McNamara—aboard an airline
leaving Vietnam—candidly telling RAND analyst Ellsberg that the war is unwinnable,
before announcing at a press conference that progress is being made. To forge
ahead with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Graham had to commit to
offending McNamara and others, in the name of journalistic candor. It was her
respect for Bradlee’s brash but principled journalistic standards that tipped
the balance.
Steven Spielberg decided to make this film last March, on a
break from his ambitious sfx-heavy videogame movie, Ready Player One. To play Graham and Bradlee, he recruited two of
Hollywood’s finest, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. They make fine sparring
partners, in a film that offers real lessons for today. There are lots of
quaint 1970s touches in The Post—telephone
booths, news stories banged out on typewriters, linotype machines that spit out
printed newspapers, bulky documents that must be copied page by page in Xerox
machines. And, of course, few women in newsrooms, and even fewer in boardrooms.
But in today’s era of “fake news” accusations, it’s all the more heartening to
focus on a time when journalists took on the government, cluing in the American
people to what was secretly being done in their names. Freedom of the press is
one of the sacred pillars on which our government rests, and I for one thank
Spielberg for reminding us of the price we pay for cronyism and for burying our
heads in the sand.
Trivia time: The
classic Sousa march, “The Washington Post,” was written in 1889 for the awards ceremony
celebrating the winners of the newspaper’s essay contest.
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